SINGAPORE (February 5, 2026) — Shield AI today announced the expansion of their partnership with Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA) and the Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF) to co-develop and proliferate Artificial Intelligence (AI) across a wider range of autonomous drone applications using Shield AI’s Hivemind software development kit (SDK). Building on existing explorations and early use cases, the expansion looks to develop and embed autonomous capabilit...

I've been exploring Go for building small, fast and self-contained binary applications recently. I'm enjoying how there's generally one obvious way to do things and the resulting code is boring and readable - and something that LLMs are very competent at writing. The one catch is distribution, but it turns out publishing Go binaries to PyPI means any Go binary can be just a uvx package-name call away. sqlite-scanner sqlite-scanner is my new Go CLI tool for scanning a filesystem for SQLite...

It's been a year since I invited Americans to join us in a pledge to Share the American Dream : 1. Support organizations you feel are  effectively helping  those most in need across America right now . 2. Within the next five years, also contribute  public dedications of time or funds towards longer term efforts  to keep the American Dream fair and attainable for all our children. Stay gold, America. 💛 Personally, I’ve become a big believer in one particular quote, especially conside...

Wandering around maze known as the Computer Science building at Oxford I found the computer science library. Rarely these days do you see a library (and a librarian) devoted to computer science. The librarian found their copy of The Golden Ticket and asked me to inscribe and sign it, just like at Dagstuhl , perhaps the only other active CS library I know of. It brought back memories of the early 90s when I would often head to the  Math/CS library at the University of Chicago to track down s...

Eight years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. Every year, I post an update about how that’s going and what my life is like as an indie founder. Previously on… I don’t expect you to go back and read my last seven updates. Here’s all you need to know: 2018 - 2020 - Quit my job and created several unprofitable businesses. 2020 - 2024 - Created a product called TinyPilot that let people control their computers remote...

I am hosting the IndieWeb Book Club for this month, in which everyone interested is invited to read and write a blog post about The Art of Explanation: How to Communicate with Clarity and Confidence [ Goodreads link ]. The book was authored by Ros Atkins, a BBC journalist whose career has spanned radio on the BBC World Service and television on BBC News. I read this book toward the end of last year and loved that the advice given was tactical, engaging, and interspersed with stories. I’d h...

It’s February! This means I have been at the JKU for four months. Four months with teaching Compiler Construction and System Software , lots of new responsibilities (most notably signing off on telephone bills and coffee orders…), many new colleagues, and new things to learn for me, not least because of the very motivated students and PhD students here. And when I say motivated, yes, I am very surprised. While the attendance of my 8:30am Compiler Construction lectures was declining thro...

Vertical boring machine, via Industrial History . Welcome to the Reading List, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. Some housekeeping items: Continuing with the new reading list format this week, this time with a paywall ~1/3rd of the way down. I got some feedback that folks liked a little more analysis, so I’ve expanded that a bit more. As a reminder, this is intended to be a little bit more comprehensive than the older format, a...

I keep window shopping for ThinkPads. I think I’ve settled on a T14, maybe an older-generation AMD if it plays well with FreeBSD and/or Linux. Under the System Expansion Slots in the web configuration tool, there’s always an option to select a Smart Card Reader . It’s disabled by default, but can be selected for the princely sum of $30 Australian. It’s been a hot minute since I worked in a large corporate and needed to sign-in using one of these cards. I also have no intention of ...

Suppose we have reached endgame capitalism. Suppose we have colonized the worlds as in Ender's Game. How should we manage our stock portfolio? Investing in many uncorrelated assets de-risks your position. In 2026, there are not enough sufficiently uncorrelated assets for complete de-risking. In Ender's Game, there are. There are so many in fact that, when every investor distributes his wealth along N investments, all investors continue to be ~uncorrelated. Capital will now run away risk-free. Wh...

pycparser is my most widely used open source project (with ~20M daily downloads from PyPI [1] ). It's a pure-Python parser for the C programming language, producing ASTs inspired by Python's own . Until very recently, it's been using PLY: Python Lex-Yacc for the core parsing. In this post, I'll describe how I collaborated with an LLM coding agent (Codex) to help me rewrite pycparser to use a hand-written recursive-descent parser and remove the dependency on PLY. This has been an interesti...

Eleventy started as a side project. Now it’s a critical infrastructure for thousands of websites. TL;DR: Open source isn’t broken. But the way we fund it often is. Let’s talk about what actually works. In this episode, we sit down with Zach Leatherman, creator of Eleventy (11ty), to talk honestly about what happens after open source succeeds. From nap-time coding and nights-and-weekends maintenance to venture capital pressure, burnout risk, and the reality of funding long-lived develop...

I was going through the list of CIDR papers this year and looking for ones that were relevant to my interests. If you're not familiar with CIDR as an institution, it's basically the "short, kind of kooky" database papers conference. You're more likely to find things that are a little looser, a little more speculative, a little more off the wall, and a little more self-contained. I enjoyed On the Vexing Difficulty of Evaluating IN Predicates , which is relevant to my interests as far as "surpr...

I've been thinking about how this site may be able to live on after I'm gone. Maybe it could become a family heirloom? I’ve thought about this topic more generally before , but this one is specifically about blogging. This blog is by far the hobby I have sunk the most time into over the last 13-ish years, and I’d like to think I’ll continue as I head from middle age, to old age. Let’s say I live until I’m 80, I will have spent over 50 years of my time on this earth writing con...

I now see how it can be addictive: A mindblowing experience and feeling like I see the world a bit differently. A feeling of being super smart and powerful. Getting lured in with free samples then everything costs. How it grabs my attention when using it, and then when I am not using it, I yearn to get back in. Is it productive to think of generative AI as a new drug? I have been thinking of a project in the decentralized web arena and trying to find someone to hire or inspire to tr...

I write a lot of Makefiles . I use it not as a command runner but as an ad-hoc build system for small projects, typically for compiling Markdown documents and their dependencies. Like so: And the above graph was generated by this very simple Makefile: graph.png : graph.dot dot -Tpng $< -o $@ clean : rm -f graph.png (I could never remember the automatic variable syntax until I made flashcards for them.) It works for simple project...

When you slip a slide under a microscope, a system of glass lenses magnifies the object of your attention — a microbe, for example. But even with the largest zoom on a classic compound optical system, scientists struggle to make sense of finer details, which can be further obscured when tough cell walls make it difficult to inject dyes that help identify structures. Now, rather than invest in… Source When you slip a slide under a microscope, a system of glass lenses magnifies the object o...

I told Kevin I was going to write this post since we were discussing this topic the other day. This is my half of the argument; maybe he’ll write an “Adblocking = Piracy” post on his site if he finds the time between one meeting and the other. I am not the first person to write this post; I am sure I won’t be the last. Plenty of people have expressed their opinion on this subject, and so far, no consensus has been reached (and I suspect never will). For me, the reason why the two a...

SaaS is the most profitable business model on Earth. 1 It’s easy to understand why: build once, sell the same thing again ad infinitum, and don’t suffer any marginal costs on more sales. I have been writing software for more than half my life. In the last year itself, I’ve talked to hundreds of founders and operators in SF, from preseed to Series E companies. AI is bringing an existential threat to a lot of B2B SaaS executives: How to keep asking customers for renewal, when every cu...

I don't know how to properly raise this, but I've gotten at least 100 emails from various Zendesk customers (no discernible pattern, everything from Soundcloud to GitLab Support to the Furbo Pet Camera). Is Zendesk being hacked? I'll update the post with more information as it is revealed. I don't know how to properly raise this, but I've gotten at least 100 emails from various Zendesk customers (no discernible pattern, everything from Soundcloud to GitLab Support to...

Given any string of bytes, you can convert it to an hexadecimal string by mapping the least significant and the most significant 4 bits of byte to characters in 01...9A...F . There are more efficient techniques like base64, that map 3 bytes to 4 characters. However, hexadecimal outputs are easier to understand and often sufficiently concise. A simple function to do the conversion using a short lookup table is as follows: static const char hex [] = "0123456789abcdef" ; for ( ...

Announcement: Before we begin the article, I’m thrilled to share that apart from running my flagship  Moon Monday blog+newsletter, I’m continuing with the Open Lunar Foundation  and its nice team for another year to help communicate the non-profit’s  research work of forging technical and policy building blocks for cooperative and peaceful lunar exploration globally. It’s a mission that aligns extremely well with the ethos of Moon Monday. 🌙 Disclaimer for transparency:  ...

Originally, I was drafting this in September, planning on dedicating it to Windows 10 Home becoming EOL. I also figured I’d share a meme that contained something along the following: Instead, however, it’s early 2026, and I feel like a dedication to RAM prices would be a more fitting start: Memes aside, the lightweight laptop - what I’m typing this post on - has a whopping total of 2 GB of ram (1. Originally, I was drafting this in September, planning on dedicating it to Windows 10 Home ...